Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome.
Interpretation
Facts are data that remain constant, while theories are interpretations that can change over time.
In this quote, Stephen Jay Gould emphasizes the distinction between facts and theories in the realm of science. He argues that facts are objective pieces of information that exist independently of our understanding or interpretations, while theories are the conceptual frameworks we use to make sense of those facts. He highlights that even as scientists may debate different theories to explain the same facts, the facts themselves remain unchanged and continue to exist in reality, illustrating the stability of data versus the fluidity of human understanding.
In practice
A scientist giving a presentation on the importance of distinguishing between empirical data and theoretical frameworks.
The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.
Some evolutionists will protest that we are caricaturing their view of adaptation. After all, do they not admit genetic drift, allometry, and a variety of reasons for nonadaptive evolution?
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
For Dawkins, evolution is a battle among genes, each seeking to make more copies of itself. Bodies are merely the places where genes aggregate for a time.
This investigation has yielded an unanticipated result that reaction of cyanic acid with ammonia gives urea, a noteworthy result in as much as it provides an example of the artificial production of an organic, indeed a so-called animal, substance from inorganic substances.
Oh leave the Wise our measures to collate. One thing at least is certain, light has weight. One thing is certain and the rest debate. Light rays, when near the Sun, do not go straight.
It takes so long to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them.
More than any other product of human scientific culture scientific knowledge is the collective property of all mankind.
The typical imperative from biology is not "Thou shalt... ," but "If ... then ... else.
Cutting off fundamental, curiosity-driven science is like eating the seed corn. We may have a little more to eat next winter but what will we plant so we and our children will have enough to get through the winters to come?
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